Stepping into what was once the living room, Kendra stopped dead.
Boxes, gift bags, books, toys—anything and everything a baby and a child would ever need were stacked up, wall to wall, filling the room. She couldn’t even see the couch!
“Gideon,” she rasped, taking a careful step forward, unable to believe what she was seeing with her eyes. “What is all this?”
Behind her, Gideon cleared his throat nervously. “I wanted to make sure our baby had everything he or she needed—I didn’t…I didn’t want them to go without—and,” he slipped around her to rummage through the boxes next to the couch, “I want to make sure you had everything you would need, too.” Kendra was speechless, her eyes gazing down at what he was holding in his hands.
It was a photo album.
With shaking hands, she took it from him and opened it. Her breath caught at the very first page.
Excitedly Waiting For Baby Maddoxwas written in her husband’s strong, decisive handwriting.
And beneath that was a sonogram image from her appointment with Dr. Chaudry, from what seemed like a lifetime ago, but was only just ten days.
“Where did you get this?” she asked, skimming her finger over the grainy black and white image of their baby.
Our baby…I’m really pregnant…there’s really a little Maddox-Little person in there….
She knew she’d never fully absorb the truth—it was too surreal, unbelievable, like a long-whispered plea, nearly given up on just as God finally breathed their prayer into being.
“When I saw the printout from the OB, I called and asked them to email the sonogram images for me.” He came to stand beside her, his gaze pinned to the image on the page, love shining in his eyes. “I thought…I thought that when I saw the image, it would feel real, that it wouldn’t just be this idea of a baby, but it would be this fact—cold, hard, digestible. That I could swallow it and just go about my day like nothing changed….”
Her heart hurt for him, for the raw edge in his voice, for the regret and remorse written into the lines on his beautiful face, into the graying hairs gilding his temples.
“But you couldn’t,” Kendra concluded.
He shook his head, a sad smile on his lips. “I couldn’t. The truth is, that image, that black and white blob—it destroyed me. It took every part of me I had long locked away, and it set it on fire—and I am utterly defeated.”
Taking the photo album from her, he flipped through each empty page. “I want to fill this with us—pictures of us, of our lives, of things we love and cherish and want to share with our little one. When he or she is here, I don’t want there to be just the bad of our beginning, I want the hopes of our future, our dreams for our family….”
Oh.
God.
A sob crawled up her throat and she couldn’t catch it in time. “I don’t know if I can believe this is real?—”
“I understand that, baby,” he declared, placing the photo album on the coffee table stacked with every parent and baby book known to man. “And I know it will take more than what happened at the gala and all these things…but I want you toknow that I meant what I said, that I will do whatever I need to for you to come home to me…to stay.”
Kendra sunk onto the couch, her knees giving out, as Gideon hurried to clear a spot for himself.
“I still don’t understand, Gideon,” Kendra admitted, plopping back into the cushions, exhausted but still somehow wired.
“Understand what?” he asked, tugging himself out of his tux jacket and throwing it over a box containing an unassembled stroller/car seat combo.
“I get that you had a terrible childhood, that you were abandoned by your mother, that your father was a drunken lecher, and that you had to become both mother and father to your little brothers. I get that requires you to grow up fast, and I get that it doesn’t leave room for a young boy to learn about his emotions…but….”
God, how could she phrase this without sounding like a total bitch?
He cocked his head as though listening to her thoughts, then said, “But what?”
“That doesn’t explain why you were an asshole to me,” she grumbled, crossing her arms over her chest, suddenly feeling too vulnerable in that stupid dress. She still had her comfy clothes in the closet, she could change, but that meant being naked with Gideon around, and with memories of how he was looking at her during the gala, and those husky, wicked words he’d murmured into her ears, she knew she wasn’t safe from being ravished.
Don’t deny yourself what you really want, fool!
But she had to; there was too much left unsaid, unexplained.
Gideon was quiet for long moments, the silence heavy with deliberate contemplation, but then he spoke and her attention didn’t stray.
